The Competition between 21st Century Skills vs. Retraining vs. Science and Math in Obama Education Priorities

I have been spending a lot of time in DC over the last month, participating in planning sessions at increasingly high levels. And I am being drawn into the interesting competition in the Obama administration between three different education objectives.

The first is to develop what is being popularly called 21st Century skills (that I have called Big Skills). These are skills that have not showed up on traditional curricula, and are around topics like leadership, project management, innovation, and stewardship. The excitement in this area is that it could challenge the traditional K-12 curricula in areas that would both help students immediately in their day-to-day life, give them more power and control of their entire lives, and also align schools with business, whose absence of such critical skills have largely resulted in the current economic crisis and US decline in global competitiveness. The problem is that plenty people believe that all of the skills are unteachable. Thus, in swinging for a home run, Obama could spend precious time and resources and whiff completely. And of course plenty of academics believe leadership (and other "learning to do" skills) is vocational.

A second contingency is focused on how to retrain American workers for what is thought to be new jobs in the new economy. They wonder, for example, what will it take to train fired car manufacturer employees into people who can install and maintain new wind turbines.

A third contingency believes that education should be increasingly focused in the traditional but underfunded and underdeveloped areas of pure science and engineering. These advocates cite recent declines in patents relative to other countries and innovation based manufacturing as proof that we need to double down, or even triple down, our efforts in these areas. The critics however might suggest that the current emphasis on science and engineering is too limited, too exclusive, and just not the right fit for too many people.

The good news for us simulation designers is that we will play a critical role in any of these three areas. We may uniquely be able to create media to support the 21st-century skill goals. We could drastically cut the costs and increase the efficiency (including scale) of a retraining focus. And we could lead the revolution in re-thinking and re-engaging a new generation in science and engineering. The only bad scenario however may be the most probable - when all is said and done, nothing new really happens.